The McBush ‘War On Terror’: More Thoughts

In the last few days the al Maliki government in Iraq has told the United States government, neither of which is a model of democracy, that it wants American and other foreign troops out of the country and wants them out by some particular date.

The McBush government at first said that al Maliki didn’t mean what everyone else thought he meant (including, apparently, al Maliki). A misinterpretation, was the interpretation given by the McBush people at State and the White House.

They spun it a couple of more ways, but al Maliki stuck to his guns. Occupiers out of Iraq. Timetable. Date certain. McBush of course doesn’t like that. His finger puppet rebelling against him? After all McBush had done for the Iraqis.

For example, illegally invaded Iraq. Illegally occupied Iraq. Created a civil war that killed untold numbers of Iraqis, along with the untold number of innocent men, women and children Americans slaughtered. (The Lion suggests that in relation to the American armies and mercenaries, all Iraqis are innocent, since the initial act, the invasion, was a crime against humanity, and all the fruits of it are tainted with criminal intent and action.) Destroyed Iraqi infrastructure on a massive scale.

And so on and so forth goes the list of McBush gifts to the Iraqi people. And now McBush is angry that the Iraqis want him to take his toy armies and go home.

But Iraq is a sovereign nation. McBush has said so. So if Iraq says get the hell out of our sandbox, McBush has to go. His John incarnation said so four years ago. It’s on tape. Olbermann’s show had it last night.

McBush makes much of wanting to install a democracy in Iraq, whether the Iraqis want it or not. He lives daily with the delusion that all will be peace and light in that nation he shattered if only he gets to keep his armies there.

That, of course, is the rub. The underlying schisms and fractures and rents and tears of the Iraqi nation have not been dealt with, have not been fixed, have not been healed. Nor will they be as long as the Americans insist on keeping a colonial army in place to twist Iraqi culture into an American creature.

All McBush has succeeded in doing is keeping the lid on the seething cauldron under which he lit a fire. If he lifts the lid a little by taking part of his toy army home or sending it to his other catastrophe, Afghanistan, the cauldron will boil over. Iraqis will die. Americans will die. The American economy will swirl the drain ever faster.

Only the Iraqi people can settle their own hash. And they can only do it when the Americans are gone, gone to the last man, gone to the last tank, the last humvee, the last Stryker. No government supported by an occupying army will ever have legitimacy, and certainly cannot be considered sovereign.

Unfortunately McBush didn’t get the memo from the reality bureau, and wants to stay in Iraq for another hundred years, bloodying the Iraqis, destroying American lives, wrenching the American economy into tattered rags.

After all, he has his legacy to consider. And of course Republicans don’t quit. Especially when they are wrong. That’s the Republican way.

But there’s more to it. There’s the broccoli question, which has only barely been touched on by the so-called mainstream media. (The Lion notes that the mainstream media is much like a polluted river now, filled with junk and waste, holding little of value, and whose very reason for being, the flow of good water, has been rendered useless.)

The old broccoli question, which most thinking people are familiar with and which Republiconservatives are not, simply asks if the United States would bother with Iraq if its main product was broccoli rather than oil.

It is, of course, simplistic. But despite that it possesses the virtue of being truthful. If Iraqis raised broccoli instead of oil, millions of them would be alive instead of dead. Their land would not be torn by American invaders. They might fight among themselves over arcane religious questions, but no one else would bother them.

But no, the Iraqis, descendants of the oldest civilization, indeed, likely the original civilization of Earth, are cursed by the ghost of plants and animals dead for eons.

And America, cursed by greed, by arrogance, and led by a political party and a group of men whose arrogance and ignorance know no bounds, and whose answer to all questions is to destroy and kill those who have what these men want, America wants the Iraqi ghost.

Wow. We invaded Iraq to bring the benefits of democracy to the Iraqis (well, that was one of the many reasons given by Bush et al for the invasion). A democracy which will be free of foreign domination. Then when the government (legal or not) asserts itself as a soveriegn state and asks us to leave, we ignore them? Sounds more like a colony than a sovereign state.

Damn, Ric. You really, really, depress me sometimes. Actually, you don’t, just the idiocy you find and expose depresses me.

Ric – I need you to post on the FISA vote. I don’t have it in me today, and I came here expecting that I could get my fill of unmitigated disdain for the politics of Democratic capitulation from some scathing post you would have written in the middle of the night! What gives? Help a brother out. I’m exhausted by the whole sickening charade.

I heard an interesting opinion yesterday. It goes like this – if Hillary Clinton had been the nominee, Obama would have been the one registering the “mock outrage” and she would have been the one voting with the majority. Think about it.

I am quite literally stunned by that vote. If there was ever a message from the Democratic Party that they have abandoned democracy, that was it. As for Senator Obama, I was prepared to support him, but with that vote and his support of expanding Bush’s faith-based programs, he’s lost my vote. I’ll waste it on a third party candidate rather than vote for him or any other Democrat.

I expect some policy twists and turns from him, from any candidate, but the FISA vote was so fundamentally wrong, so destructive of Constitutional freedom, so profoundly against democracy and liberty, that it can’t be spun or forgiven. Senator Obama and the other Democrats who voted for this abomination have turned their backs on the people, on decency and integrity, on law, on democracy.